To be fair, macs depreciate at a much slower pace than your typical Windows laptop. I just sold my 2009 Mac Pro for $650.
Agreed on that point. I sold a dead logic board 2010 MBP for nearly that in 2013!
A friend of mine just sold his 2009 MacBook Pro for $1500, he originally purchased it for $2400 IIRC. That's only $900 worth of deprecation in 6 years.
Someone must have really loved that particular model. You can get an Apple-refurbished 2013 15in MBPr for that much.
Last year I bought a 2008 MacBook Pro for 200 Eur. Your friend ripped somebody off.
Or you got a REALLY good deal.
This thing was in almost perfect condition, no scratches, drops, nothing.
Personally I wouldn't pay more than $300 a machine and consider $1299 to be pretty extortionate amounts of cash considering the rate of depreciation.
Hey everyone I just worked 2x the time to pay for something shiny with no productivity gain!
(I use a shitty old X201 with 4Gb RAM and an SSD from eBay connected to a monitor I skip dived because it was 5:4 ratio)